Students leaving Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., after last month’s shooting. The suspect, Nikolas Cruz, is white, and far from evading disciplinary procedures, he had been expelled from the school.Credit
Saul Martinez for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — After a gunman marauded through Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last month, conservative commentators — looking for a culprit — seized on an unlikely target: an Obama-era guidance document that sought to rein in the suspensions and expulsions of minority students.

Black students have never been the perpetrators of the mass shootings that have shocked the nation’s conscience nor have minority schools been the targets. But the argument went that any relaxation of disciplinary efforts could let a killer slip through the cracks.

And this week, President Trump made the connection, announcing that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos will lead a school safety commission charged in part with examining the “repeal of the Obama administration’s ‘Rethink School Discipline’ policies.”

To civil rights groups, connecting an action to help minority students with mass killings in suburban schools smacked of burdening black children with a largely white scourge.

“Yet again, the Trump administration, faced with a domestic crisis, has responded by creating a commission to study an unrelated issue in order to ultimately advance a discriminatory and partisan goal,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, the president and director-counsel at NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc.

“School shootings are a grave and preventable problem, but rescinding the school discipline guidance is not the answer,” she said. “Repealing the guidance will not stop the next school shooter, but it will ensure that thousands more students of color are unnecessarily ushered into the school-to-prison pipeline.”

The issue of the Obama-era discipline guidance was raised formally by Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, who, after seeing a flurry of conservative news media reports, wrote a letter to Ms. DeVos and Attorney General Jeff Sessions questioning whether the guidance allowed the shooting suspect, Nikolas Cruz, to evade law enforcement and carry out the massacre at Stoneman Douglas High.

It was, on its face, an odd point: Mr. Cruz is white, and far from evading school disciplinary procedures, he had been expelled from Stoneman Douglas.

“The overarching goals of the 2014 directive to mitigate the school-to-prison pipeline, reduce suspensions and expulsions, and to prevent racially biased discipline are laudable and should be explored,” Mr. Rubio wrote, asking that the guidance be revised. “However, any policy seeking to achieve these goals requires basic common sense and an understanding that failure to report troubled students, like Cruz, to law enforcement can have dangerous repercussions.”

Broward County educators and advocates saw Mr. Rubio’s letter as an indictment of a program called Promise, which the county instituted in 2013 — one year before the Obama guidance was issued — and has guided its discipline reforms to reduce student-based arrests in Broward County, where Stoneman Douglas is.

The N.A.A.C.P. said that Mr. Rubio “notably backs away from raising the purchase age for assault-style rifles and restricting magazine capacity,” and instead focuses on a system that once sent one million minority students to Florida jails for “simple and routine discipline issues ranging from talking back to teachers to schoolyard scuffles.”

In a tweet on Tuesday, Mr. Rubio noted that the gunman was not in the Promise program, but had displayed violent and threatening behavior.

“The more we learn, the more it appears the problem is not the program or the DOE guidance itself, but the way it is being applied,” Mr. Rubio said, referring to the Education Department. “It may have created a culture discourages referral to law enforcement even in egregious cases like the #Parkland shooter.”

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Long before the attack in Parkland, Fla., the 2014 discipline guidelines, which encouraged schools to examine their discipline disparities and to take stock of discriminatory policies, were already on Ms. DeVos’s radar — but not because they were seen as a possible culprit in the next school shooting. Conservatives were using the Trump administration’s effort to rein in federal overreach to reverse policies designed to protect against what the Obama administration had seen as discriminatory practices.

The “Rethink Discipline,” package that Mr. Trump’s commission will examine includes guidance that the Obama administration issued on the legal limitations on the use of restraints and seclusion, corporal punishment and equity for special education students.

In recent months, educators and policy experts from across the country have traveled to Washington to voice support for and opposition to the disciplinary guidance, in private meetings with officials at the Education Department and in a series of public forums.

Since the discipline guidelines were issued, conservatives have blamed the document for creating unsafe educational environments by pressuring schools to keep suspension numbers down to meet racial quotas, even if it meant ignoring troubling and criminal behavior. Teachers who sought suspensions or expulsions of minority students were painted as racists, conservatives maintained.

“Evidence is mounting that efforts to fight the school-to-prison pipeline is creating a school climate catastrophe and has if anything put at-risk students at greater risk,” said Max Eden, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, who argued that teacher bias was not the driving force behind school discipline.

But proponents argued that racial bias was well documented.

When the guidance was issued, federal data found that African-American students without disabilities were more than three times as likely as their white peers without disabilities to be expelled or suspended, and that more than 50 percent of students who were involved in school-related arrests or who were referred to law enforcement were Hispanic or African-American.

“Children’s safety also includes protection from oppression and bigotry and injustice,” Daniel J. Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California at Los Angeles’s Civil Rights Project, wrote in testimony to the Civil Rights Commission. “Fear-mongering and rhetoric that criminalizes youth of color, children from poor families and children with disabilities should not be tolerated.”

The Education and Justice Departments wrote in a 2014 Dear Colleague letter that discipline disparities could be caused by a range of factors, but the statistics in the federal data “are not explained by more frequent or more serious misbehavior by students of color.” The departments also noted that several civil rights investigations had verified that minority students were disciplined more harshly than their white peers for the same infractions.

“In short, racial discrimination in school discipline is a real problem,” the guidance said.

In recent months, Ms. DeVos has said change will be coming. She has already moved to rescind a regulation that protects against racial disparities in special education placements. Her goal, she said last month, was to be “sensitive to all of the parties involved.”

In a bruising interview on “60 Minutes” on Sunday, Ms. DeVos said that the disproportionate discipline issue “comes down to individual kids.” She declined to say whether she believed that black students disciplined more harshly for the same infraction were the victims of institutional racism.

“We’re studying it carefully and are committed to making sure students have opportunity to learn in safe and nurturing environments,” she said.

Ms. DeVos’s office for civil rights also announced that it would scale back the scope of investigations, reversing an approach taken under the Obama administration to conduct exhaustive reviews of school districts’ practices and data when a discrimination complaint was filed.

But Ms. DeVos’s own administration has continued to find racial disparities. In November, the Education Department found that the Loleta Union Elementary School District in California doled out harsher treatment to Native American students than their white peers. For example, a Native American student received a one-day out-of-school suspension for slapping another student on the way to the bus, in what was that student’s first disciplinary referral of the year. A white student received lunch detention for slapping two students on the same day — the student’s fifth and sixth referrals that year.

While Mr. Cruz was repeatedly kicked out of class and ultimately expelled, it is unclear whether he was ever referred to the police for his behavior in school. However, Mr. Cruz was known to law enforcement, which never found cause to arrest him, and a report of troublesome behavior to the F.B.I. went unheeded.

The Broward County superintendent, Robert Runcie, said that Mr. Rubio’s effort to connect the district’s discipline policies to the Stoneman Douglas shooting was misguided.

“We’re not going to dismantle a program that’s been successful in the district because of false information that someone has put out there,” Mr. Runcie said on Twitter. “We will neither manage nor lead by rumors.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 14, 2018, on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Points to Culprit in School Shootings, and It Isn’t Guns. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe